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So you’ve got yourself land in a brand new sim? Excited? Probably not for long because he’s here, he’s there, he’s every damn where. The picture is an example of his work in a brand new sim and apparently he’s done the same in two others already.

Devaluing land everywhere he roams, riding roughshod over ethics and hey LL might sit back and take the tier for now, but this sort of mess is going to end in one result, your auctions are going to be devalued too.

When a new sim owner or the first excited new tenants find the value of their land is dropping overnight then someone is going to take a hit and that hit is eventually going to go all the way back to LL.

Now I know that the idea of releasing new sims is to stabilise land prices and stem the increases in land prices we’ve seen of late and heck in that regard, why bother with new sims, just let him have the land because it sure does deflate prices. Give him the reclaimed land, he’ll bring prices crashing like a stone to make everyone who complains that land is over priced happy.

How long can this carry on for? There is no value being added to the land here, a brand new sim that is an eyesore already. People have tried new tricks, they’ve tried to wall his “ads” in, but the very fact that they are there means that the land has already lost value.

Now some may argue that this is part of the beauty of mainland, the wild west nature, to be able to do more or less what you like, how you like, when you like (as long as you don’t violate the TOS). However I’m sorry, but this is a gross abomination and something needs to be done. Continue reading “Welcome To Hell”

Rick Logan’s profile simply reads “Gone and closed”. However vendors at Dusty’s rock and country lounge see it more as “Gone and ran off with the money”.

When my items were returned to me today I merely assumed I’d missed a notice about rental, however not so it turns out. You can’t TP to Dusty’s anymore, the location is not available. I’m one of the lucky ones. Bells Beck of BB designed for you used to run her own mall, but all that came to an end when the land owner asked her to remove the mall as they were considering selling the land. Bells refunded everyone, apologised profusely and told me she’ll only open a mall of her own if she owns the land herself.

So how does someone like Bells react when she appears to have lost around six weeks worth of rental money? Well she wasn’t holding back on her opinion of Rick Logan: Continue reading “We Are The Angry Mob”

They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity and this will be tested with regards to Second Life this week when the BBC2 documentaty“Virtual Adultery and cyberspace love” is aired.

The Beeb is of course the bastion of no advertising (Other than its own stuff) and worth every single penny of the licence fee to stop it denigrating into the awful crap that is aired on its main commercial rival ITV. However sometimes they can’t avoid giving a backward plug to the product and no matter how bad this documentary is, someone is going to take a peek into Second Life on the back of it.

The premise of the documentary is regarding people spending too much time online and falling in love with people they’ve never met, even though they themselves are married. People who spend upto eighteen hours a day online will be featured and a woman who travels thousands of miles to meet her Second Life partner, leaving behind her existing family. Continue reading “Batten Down The Hatches”

There’s something unhealthy in the land market within Second Life, most notably the private market. A bustling trade in ripping people off, signed, sealed and delivered with the “We don’t get involved in resident to resident disputes” motto.

I’m trying to get my head around why an honest purchaser would fail to ask what happens to existing tenants when they take over an estate. There seems to be a philosophy that the purchaser can’t possibly be in the wrong, yet to me, this is a case of see no evil, hear no evil yadda yadda yadda.

Time and again I see complaints from evicted residents. Sometimes you see counter claims from landlords and yet, underneath it all, people shrug their shoulders and mutter: “There’s nothing you can do about it.” This is fundamentally wrong. Continue reading “Sherriff Fatman”

There are those who fear the arrival of the taxman into virtual worlds. There is of course already a presence, income tax, capital gains tax, VAT, take your pick. However some of us feel they might want an even bigger slice of the cake and start looking at inworld currencies.

However I’m here to temporarily alleviate your fears, because at the moment the taxman doesn’t appear to know his arse from his elbow when it comes to virtual worlds.

In early October I started a dialogue (a slow, long, painful, dialogue) with HMRC (The UK taxman). My point being, why the heck am I paying VAT for tier on virtual world land? The problems seem to arise via laws, laws that were implemented without consideration of virtual worlds such as Second Life and inworld currencies. Continue reading “The Taxman’s Taken All My Dough”